The Grateful Dead - Midnight Hour - Non-Album Tracks (1966)

Here's the second of two albums dealing with the best of the cover songs performed by the Grateful Dead in 1965 and 1966. This album just covers the second half of 1966.

I said this only covers "the best of the cover songs," so let me explain what I mean by that. The Dead played tons of songs in 1966. (Very little survives of them from 1965, other than some studio recordings.) The website www.setlists.fm, lists 70 different songs played by the band in 1966, compared to only 33 in 1967. Twelve of those were originals, which I compiled on the album I called "Mindbender." That still leaves nearly 60 songs, and between this and the other covers album I just posted, I've only included 25 songs.

So how and why did I whittle this down to only 25 songs? I wanted to make these two albums something I'd like to listen to a lot. So the first thing I did was remove nearly all the songs that the Dead would go on to perform lots of times later in their career, because I (and any typical fan of the group) would already be very familiar with those. There are lots of songs like that, such as "Viola Lee Blues," "Me and My Uncle," "Cold Rain and Snow," "Sitting on Top of the World." and so on.

I did include a couple of songs like that for various reasons. For instance, I included "Good Lovin'" because it was sung by Bob Weir, whereas Ron 'Pigpen' McKernan would sing it for the next bunch of years until he died in 1973. I included "Dancing in the Street" and "In the Midnight Hour" because I wanted a couple of lively songs where the band got to stretch out and jam, since that was a key part of their 1966 sound, where they often tried to balance being both daneecable and jammy.

There's another big bunch of songs I didn't include either because there were no recordings at all, or none of high enough sound quality.

There are also many songs that I just didn't feel were good enough for inclusion. One thing I strove for was to have some balance between songs sung by Jerry Garcia, Weir, and McKernan, even though McKernan tends to dominate. There were a bunch of McKernan-led bluesy songs that weren't that different from each other. Had I included a lot of those, it would have changed the overall sound of the album from lively and danceable into slow and bluesy. I did include some of those however, especially when I thought Garcia's lead guitar work was particularly impressive.

On the first album, all but one of the performances have been officially released. But on this one, about half are still unreleased. Those are all taken from a series of concerts at The Matrix in San Francisco in late November and early December 1966. These concerts are all excellent soundboards (I assume recorded by Stanley). I surprised that nothing from those concerts have been officially released (yet?).

By the way, there's one song here, "It's My Own Fault," taken from one of those Matrix shows, where the voice of the lead vocalist is unclear. It's definitely not McKernan, and it doesn't sound like Weir or Garcia either. Doing some Googling, I see that some people speculate it either was someone else in the band who rarely sang lead, or it was some unknown guest vocalist. It's definitely the Dead playing though, as you can tell from Garcia's great guitar work.

Oh, one other note. The version of "In the Midnight Hour" comes from an official release (the "30 Trips Around the Sun" box set), but it's edited by me. That's because that version started out playing fast, then about a minute in there was some kind of tape glitch, followed by some wobbly sounds, and then the rest of the song was at a slow pace and a different pitch. That sounded bad to me, no doubt due to some tape damage, so I cut out the worst couple of minutes. Then I changed the tempo and pitch of the first part to match the rest and created a seamless edit. The result is a couple of minutes shorter than the official version (yet still 13 minutes long), but I think it sounds a lot better.

01 Nobody's Fault but Mine (Grateful Dead)
02 Keep Rolling By (Grateful Dead)
03 He Was a Friend of Mine (Grateful Dead)
04 One Kind Favor [See that My Grave Is Kept Clean] (Grateful Dead)
05 Overseas Stomp [The Lindy] (Grateful Dead)
06 I Just Want to Make Love to You (Grateful Dead)
07 Big Boy Pete (Grateful Dead)
08 It's a Sin (Grateful Dead)
09 You Don't Love Me (Grateful Dead)
10 It's My Own Fault (Grateful Dead)
11 In the Midnight Hour [Edit] (Grateful Dead)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15118603/TGratefulD_1966_MidnghtHour_atse.zip.html

I called this "Midnight Hour" because I couldn't think of a better name. None of the song titles worked that well, I felt. If you have a better title suggestion, please let me know.

Thanks to Peter at the Albums I Wish Existed blog for the cover art.